North Central Catchment Management Authority

Amidst escalating climate change challenges, effective land use planning and decision-making are crucial for nurturing resilient and sustainable landscapes. Decision-makers often struggle with unintended consequences due to the intricate system dynamics, compounded by fragmented information and divergent stakeholder perspectives. This research integrates science, stakeholder engagement, and systems thinking to navigate the complexities of land use planning in response to climate change. We develop a decision-making framework for climate-cognisant sustainable land use planning, incorporating systems thinking principles. The framework uses validated expert system models to assess climate change impacts on agricultural land use. Through collaborative engagement with end users, it is refined to address specific regional challenges and opportunities. Applied within a case study in Victoria, Australia, and generalized for broader contexts, the framework provides a practical, systemic-intervention-driven process for better regional planning decisions amid evolving climate complexities. Keywords: Climate Change, Land Use Planning, Systems Thinking, Decision Making, Stakeholder Engagement

Groundwater resources have deteriorated in many regions as a result of excessive use to satisfy increasing water demands. Furthermore, climate change has an influence on groundwater in terms of quality and quantity. An investigation of climate change impacts on quality and quantity of groundwater is vital for effective planning and sustainable management of groundwater resources. Despite of the importance of climate change impact studies on groundwater resources, climate change impact studies related to surface water resources have attracted more attention from the research community, leading to limited understanding of the groundwater and climate change relationship. In this paper, a systematic review of the latest literature related to the impact of climate change on groundwater recharge was carried out to provide guidance for future studies.

Worldwide, riverine fish are the target of environmental water because populations have declined in lotic river habitats following river regulation. Murray cod is an endangered Australian riverine fish with remaining populations associated with lotic river reaches with instream habitat, including some creeks operated as part of irrigation systems. Our objectives were to develop a life history model, apply the building block method of environmental flows to enhance the abundance of juvenile Murray cod and promote population recovery. From 2008 to 2018 we evaluated changes to Murray cod juvenile abundance before and after implementation of a perennial environmental flow regime that began in 2013. During the first year of the environmental flow, larvae were collected as evidence of spawning. Murray cod abundance can be enhanced with environmental flows that target: (1) an annual spring spawning or recruitment flow with no rapid water level drops; (2) maximising hydrodynamic complexity (i.e. flowing habitats that are longitudinally continuous and hydrodynamically complex); and (3) an annual base winter connection flow. Recognition that incorporating hydraulics (water level and velocity) at fine and coarse time scales, over spatial scales that reflect life histories, provides broader opportunities to expand the scope of environmental flows to help restore imperilled fish species in regulated ecosystems.